Avigdor Dagan, Gertrude Hirschler and Lewis Weiner, editors. The Jews of Czechoslovakia. Historical Studies and Surveys. Vol. III. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. 1984. Pp. 700.

Abstract

This chapter evaluates The Jews of Czechoslovakia Vol. III (1984), which was edited by Avigdor Dagan, Gertrude Hirschler, and Lewis Weiner. This is the final volume of a remarkable undertaking. The first two volumes, published in 1968 and 1971, dealt with pre-1939 developments and set out the complex nature of Jewish tradition and life under the Habsburgs and during the twenty years of the first Czechoslovak Republic. Czechoslovak Jewry was a very heterogeneous phenomenon, divided along linguistic, religious, cultural, and political lines. Some of these divisions, such as those between the so-called ‘assimilationists’ and Zionists, are frequently mentioned in the present volume, but the overriding topic here is the Holocaust in all its aspects — Nazi policy, Jewish reactions, and the attitudes of non-Jews. It is in fact the first comprehensive one-volume treatment of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia in any language.